How quickly things can change. Realtors® across American today are reeling from the constricting pinch in the real estate market. Housing inventories are way up, days on the market painfully long and the gap between the “Listed Price” and what a property eventually sells for seem forever widening. Realtors® are deserting their profession in droves.

All but a fortunate few Realtors® are experiencing the toughest time in their real estate careers. The heady days of “Slam dunk” deals coupled with zero days on the market and multiple offers that exceeded the asking price are already fading into history.

Many Realtors® want to stay in the real estate game and in a fight for survival they are looking seriously at alternatives to supplement their sagging “residential” sales.

“Short Sales” and “Foreclosures” are hot topics but with Lenders tripping over themselves to redefine the market coupled with more restrictive lending guidelines Realtors® are finding that money is scare.

Funding real estate purchases with IRA money and craftily using1031 Exchange strategies, once considered by Realtors® as too “exotic” or complicated, are gaining new found popularity.

One of the toughest questions a Realtor® must ask today is why NAR (National Association Of Realtors®) didn’t see this meltdown coming? If fact, why didn’t NAR during the good times teach Realtors® how an IRA can buy real estate, the very product Realtors® sell for a living.

Eighty-eight million Americans own Mutual Funds a revealing testament that Wall Street knows how to market its products. Undoubtedly a great percentage of Realtors® are in that number yet of the 45,000,000 IRAs in America less than 3% contain real estate, again a testament to Wall Street’s sales abilities and a condemnation of how poorly NAR has handled the responsibility of educating its 1,000,000 members to buy investment real estate in addition to financial products.

Maybe NAR does not stand alone in its dereliction of duty to educate its constituency. What about real estate offices that churn and burn agents knowing well that the bottom 50% of their Realtor® employees produce the necessary grist that funds the office machine and hierarchy.

Think about it, who really pays the office bills and salaries, the few top producing agents who are on a 90% - 10% commission split or the multitude of neophytes who are on a 50% - 50% commission split and before predictably quitting list and sell a half dozen homes?

If you are looking for “smoke and mirrors” get rich schemes RICH REALTOR® POOR REALTOR® is not for you. Nor is it a time management course designed to help your better program your ultimate failure (most MLS boards admit that 20% of its members quit each year ergo 100% quit every five years). “Salesmen Are Born Not Made” is a Chapter specifically designed to assess whether or not you should even stay in the real estate business.

Bottom line, you must educate you and in the process extricate yourself from the mediocrity that NAR and large real estate companies have engendered for decades.